ACTA: International ‘three strikes’, surveillance and worse

Tensions over ACTA are rising as the next round of negotiations are about to take place, in Switzerland next week.

How worried should we be? There are a range of potential problems, ranging from potential monitoring of internet users to access to medicines. ORG has, alongside many other civil society groups, signed a declaration drafted by copyright academics. You can sign too.

The proposals may impact freedom of speech and access to the internet, as heavy-handed copyright enforcement policies are laundered into national law via this treaty.

Meanwhile, developing countries are lining up against the proposals, in large part because they are cut out of the negotiations, and because ACTA may damage trade in generic drugs. Development organizations such as Oxfam and Medecins sans Frontieres agree with these concerns.

In the European Parliament, around 250 MEPs have signed a Written Declaration asking the EU Council to protect citizen’s rights, which are clearly threatened in the draft.

ACTA would authorize or encourage private and government enforcement measures that would:

curtail enjoyment of fundamental rights and liberties, including domestic and internationally protected human rights to health, privacy and the protection of personal data, free expression, education, cultural participation, and right to a fair legal process, including fair trial and presumptions of innocence.

THE INTERNET

ACTA would

Encourage internet service providers to police the activities of internet users by holding internet providers responsible for the actions of subscribers, conditioning safe harbors on adopting policing policies, and by requiring parties to encourage cooperation between service providers and rights holders;

Encourage this surveillance, and the potential for punitive disconnections by private actors, without adequate court oversight or due process;

ACTA would threaten global access to affordable medicines, including by:

Authorizing customs authorities to seize goods in transit countries, even when they do not infringe any laws of the producing or importing countries;

Implicating non-infringing active pharmaceutical ingredient suppliers whose materials may be used downstream in infringing products without their knowledge;

Limiting key flexibilities on injunctions, including in patent cases, that are necessary for government use, for court-ordered royalties, and for innovation prizes and other policies that de-link cost of research and development from the price of products.

Expanding its scope to patents in many areas of the agreement, which is an inappropriate subject of a counterfeiting policy;

SCOPE AND NATURE OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY LAW

ACTA would distort fundamental balances between the rights and interests of proprietors and users, including by

shifting enforcement burdens to public authorities and private intermediaries in ways that are likely to be more sensitive to proprietary concerns;

requiring formula-driven assessment of damages, potentially unrelated to any proven harm or gain;

omitting strong disincentives to abuse of enforcement processes by right holders;

including rigid injunction, damages and heightened civil and criminal enforcement requirements that will restrict government flexibility, impede innovation and slow the development and diffusion of green technology;

threaten the continuation or development of innovative public intererst exceptions, such as common law approaches to permitting copies of works by "authorization."

INTERNATIONAL TRADE

ACTA would raise barriers to the trade in knowledge imbedded goods, disproportionately harming developing countries dependent on imports and exports of essential goods. Specifically, ACTA will

Extend ‘ex officio' and in transit border search and seizures to a broad range of "suspected" intellectual property infringements, even including alleged patent infringements involving complex questions of law and fact that are impossible to judge by custom authorities.

INTERNATIONAL LAW AND INSTITUTIONS

ACTA would conflict with a large number of existing international laws and processes. Specifically, ACTA contains provisions that:

Conflict with the World Trade Organization Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) by allowing seizures based on the law "of the party providing the procedures" instead of "the country of importation" (TRIPS Art. 52) and by failing to fully protect and incorporate key protections against abuse (e.g. Articles 41.1, 48.1, 48.2, 50.3, 53.1, 56), flexibilities to promote public interests (e.g. TRIPS Art. 44.2), requirements for the proportionality of enforcement measures (e.g. Arts. 46, 47), and provisions providing for balance between the interests of proprietors, consumers and the greater society (e.g. TRIPS Arts. 1, 7, 8, 40, 41.2, 41.5, 54, 55, 58).

Conflict with the WTO Doha Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health and World Health Assembly Resolution 61.21 by limiting the ability of countries to use the TRIPS flexibilities "to the full" to promote access to medicines;

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